Apps for an Efficient House Search

For some reason, people love to buy their homes in the spring and the summer. There are lots of search tools out there to help any potential home buyer come by the house of their dreams more easily and more efficiently. You don’t need to rely on classified ads or brokers to find the right property anymore. Most of the heavy work involved these days is done on by iPhone apps, iPad apps and websites. Let's look at a few of the best house search tools you have these days.

The National Association of Realtors (the people who run the listings on Realtor.com) have their new iPad app out. It's a free download, and it allows you to browse a map of the country, district by district. You can draw a line around the places that you wish to look at. Once you do find something you like from among the listings that it turns up, you can take a look at how other potential buyers have rated the place.

One of the most challenging parts to a house search has to be keeping track of all the houses you find in your search that appear promising. BuyFolio has an iPhone app for that. You use the app to browse through all thousands of listings that you will process in your house search; any time you find something that piques your interest, you drag the property to one of the various folders you get to keep to categorize what you like, and what you need to think a bit more about.

The free ZipRealty app for all Android and iOS, once installed, finds out where you are and tries to give you details of every house in your neighborhood that was recently bought or sold. The moment you pick a house to look at more closely, it connects you to Zillow to provide you with the price the house was sold for so that you get a good idea of home prices in your area at the moment. It's a great way to keep yourself in the loop.

And finally, once you've completed that house search and zeroed in on a fixer-upper, is there a search engine that can help you get a few ideas for how to go about fixing it up? Try Houzz (who comes up with these names?). It happens to be an interior design aggregator that lets you look at tens of thousands of idea books. Every idea you see comes with information about the interior decorator who is responsible for it.